Seriously…..

Menu

rest

Fitness routine is one of the most important part of the a person’s daily life. Yes – there’s a lot of mixed thoughts and thinking around this, but fitness routine is a core importance in ensuring a healthy life.

A healthy body is a combination of 4 things (to my own opinion of course!):

Good food

Good exercise

Good rest

Healthy mind!

Good exercise means that you would need a balanced schedule of workouts, be it running, cycling, gym or even bootcamp. For me – my typical schedule is as such:

Day

Workout

Monday

Bootcamp

Tuesday

Run

Wednesday

Bootcamp

Thursday

Run

Friday

Bootcamp

Saturday

Run or Cycle

Sunday

Rest

Well – each and every day of my workout, I give myself a bonus workout. A bonus workout would be extra swim or extra 5-10km run. Depending on the extra time which I have!

For example, typically after a bootcamp session – I would go for a quick swim because I have a lot more time before I go to work. A bootcamp session finishes about 6.45am. By the time I get home, it’s about 7am. A quick 20 mins swim is great to relax my muscle.

Having such rigorous workout routine is somewhat not so good, therefore I will always ensure that my sleep is good. In the past, I’ve neglected sleep. 4 hours of sleep is good???? Yah right. Nowadays I’ll try to ensure that I sleep a minimum of 6 hours though a good 7 hours is the preferred choice. In fact 8 hours is idea!l

Another good thing to do – is to always make a check on your resting heart rate. An elevated heart rate in the morning, right after you wake up is a good gauge that your body needs rest. I’ve written about this couple of times – and I cannot emphasize is a lot further. If your body needs rest… better give it a rest. Otherwise you will end up with injuries and such!

For most people, doing exercise is a pain. Why do people sweat out and torture themselves with long runs, painful weights and boring cardio when they can just sit down and relax. I am one of those junkies who cannot stop exercising – though my physical appearance does not reflect the type of exercises that I do. To be honest, exercise does not translate to a physically fit body – there are more factors to it!

Anyway – for junkies like me, the problem has always been trying to get myself to rest. Resting in fact, as food – is a key aspect in ensuring that your body continue to function well. Rest can mean different things, but to my limited knowledge, rests are:

1) Good sleep

2) Rest day

Good sleep – is not only about 8 hours sleep, but its about good quality sleep. I.e. one will need to sleep at least X amount of hours + it needs to be a quality one too. Don’t expect having to have a good rest if you sleep 8 hours, and half the time you are waking up because the bed is too hard, or the pillow is too high. I usually don’t get decent sleep because I tend to watch TV before I sleep. Though its great to get me to sleep, I always forget to set the sleep mode, causing the TV show to run all the way to the morning. Yes – apart from the waste of electricity, the sound from the TV will indirectly cause me not to sleep well. A good sleep is the type that when you wake up – you feel refreshed! **haven’t got that in a long while!**

Rest day – is a day where you don’t actually work out. My personal problem is that I don’t let my body to rest. I workout generally about 2 hours a day without fail. And this happens daily from Monday to Sunday. So lately, I’ve been pushing myself to rest more. Getting about 1 rest day every 6 days – at least. Not very successful, but have to start somewhere. Rest day is very important so that our body can rebuild the muscles. This will also ensure that we don’t push so much that our muscles gets weaker and weaker – causing risk of injury to go up. The question really now – does light workout constitute to rest day? Say a 30 mins easy swim – something that we can relax? Heart rate around 100-110 bpm? To me its fine. But to some people its not. Well – at the end of the day, know your body! And you will be ok 🙂